The best comics of 2019 (so far)

Nick Derington/DC Comics

From DC to Marvel and the non-hero comics you have to read

Fall is here, and that means a slew of new comics releases. And the best books have never been bigger, more varied or more relevant than they are in 2019, as comic book adaptation after comic book adaptation arrives to every movie theater, console and streaming service under the sun. It can be hard to know where to start and what to read next, but that’s where we come in.

Here are the comic books of 2019 that made the Polygon staff lean in and lose ourselves, or sit up and go, “wow.” From the grandest stories of the fantastic to the most relatable works of nonfiction, these are the best comics of 2019.

Polygon Essentials is a collection of persistently updated lists of the best of the best games for each platform — from the hardware’s launch to its end of production — as well as the best entertainment across virtually every medium. For folks new to a platform, think of this as a starter kit. For long-term fans, consider it a list of what to play or watch next. We’ll be updating these lists often, with entries listed in reverse chronological order. To see a collection of other titles we recommend that might not have made the Essentials lists, check out Polygon Recommends.

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Nick Derington/DC Comics

Mister Miracle

Writing: Tom King, Art and colors: Mitch Gerads, Letters: Clayton Cowles

Mister Miracle is the greatest escape artist in the universe. Mister Miracle is about becoming so accustomed to escaping that we forget when to stop.

The twelve-issue miniseries, collected for the first time in 2019, begins with its title character surviving a suicide attempt, and goes many places from there: war, sex, show business, renovating your condo, governing a planet. A baby’s first birthday party is planned. A god tears out his own eye.

From an outside-of-comics perspective, Mister Miracle is a barely-third-tier superhero. From the vantage point of comics history, he’s a can’t-miss character, a whole cloth creation of Jack Kirby, one of the medium’s greatest talents, at a time of peak creative freedom. King and Gerads weave layers upon layers of meaning into the series, allowing it to unfold more meaning the deeper you’re willing to look.

For everything else that it is, Mister Miracle is an ode to the form and history of comics. A love letter to Jack “Comics will break your heart” Kirby and the work he did when most disillusioned with the industry.

Mister Miracle will show you it’s possible to put a heart back together again.

Get it here: Amazon | DC Comics | Comixology | Your Local Comic Shop

Aleš Kot, Heather Moore, Tradd Moore/Image Comics

The New World

Writing: Aleš Kot, Art: Tradd Moore, Colors: Heather Moore, Letters: Clayton Cowles

If a dystopian state where police brutality is manufactured into must-see reality TV can be as colorful as The New World, well, reality has a lot of catching up to do.

Stella Maris and Kirby Miyazaki are an unlikely Romeo and Juliet. She’s the hard-partying, drug-swilling televised state-sanctioned bounty hunter in the post-nuclear war New California; he’s the “straight-edge, gluten-free militant atheist” revolutionary who wants to tear her grandfather’s police state to the ground. But their romance will be just as destabilizing to the society around them.

I first knew Aleš Kot as the writer who expertly wrestled Bloodborne to the page in a form that said as much about video games as comics, and watching them tackle a completely original setting in The New World does not disappoint. Tradd Moore’s art is so pregnant with motion it feels like I could press play on it, his characters so expressive I would buy the iTunes season pass. Psychedelic would be the easy way to describe Heather Moore’s colors, transcendent might be more accurate to the emotion they create.

Just when I think I’ve had enough of The New World, I find myself paging through it again — and that it’s hard to stop.

Get it here: Amazon | Comixology | Image Comics | Your Local Comic Shop

Christopher Sebela, Ibrahim Moustafa/Image Comics

High Crimes

Writing: Christopher Sebela, Art: Ibrahim Moustafa

In the smallest of nutshells, High Crimes is about what happens when a climbing guide discovers some sensitive microfiche on the slopes of Mount Everest, and becomes the target of secret agents. Disgraced Olympic champion Zan Jensen finds a kindred spirit in dead superspy Sullivan Mars, someone else who spent their whole life doing craven things for a higher goal, and lost their way the moment they couldn’t chase the goal any longer.

Sebela and Moustafa’s graphic novel combines survival thriller with sci-fi spy thriller, tying the whole thing around a modern noir lead whose shame is tearing herself apart from the inside. Eventually, Zan’s athlete past, her drug addiction, Mars’ uncovered state secrets, and the team of killers who want it back all fade away like Zan’s oxygen starved brain cells until it’s just her, the mountain, and her inner demons.

High Crimes is the best kind of surprise, a book I picked up just to see what was what — and then could not put down for a moment until I had finished it.

Get it here: Amazon | Comixology | Image Comics | Your Local Comic Shop

Christopher Sebela, Ro Stein/Image Comics

Crowded

Writing: Christopher Sebela, Pencils: Ro Stein, Inks: Ted Brandt, Colors: Triona Farrell, Letters: Cardinal Rae

In a near-future world where every job is assigned by an app, Reapr is the Kickstarter of assassination. Nominate a target and anyone else who’d like to see them bite it can donate, crowdfunding the payout to whatever amateur killer caps them before the four-week timer is up. But if they survive, they can never be the target of another Reapr campaign — ever.

Crowded. Crowd-ded. Crowd dead. Get it?

Sebela (again) has a deft hand with parodying online culture that keeps Crowded firmly in that deliciously cringe-y realm of “Oof, too real,” while Stein’s got the kind of talent for character design and layouts that I’d love to see in any book. And their talents shine together in the book’s characters — exhausted talent managers, professional killer/live streamers, and, of course, the book’s odd couple target/bodyguard pair, Charlie Ellison and Willa Dourlet.

Read it now, before the Rebel Wilson-lead movie adaptation hits theaters, so you can say you liked it before it was cool.

Get it here: Amazon | Comixology | Image Comics | Your Local Comic Shop

Mariko Tamaki, Rosemary Valero-O’Connell/First Second Books

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me

Writing: Mariko Tamaki, Art: Rosemary Valero-O’Connell

Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me raises one of the more pressing issues concerning Gen Z queer kids: How do you balance getting upset about public, petty relationship issues while still being grateful to your queer forebears that you even get to have public, petty relationship issues at all?

Frederica knows that she owes a lot to the women who fought for her to openly date Laura Dean, the most popular girl in school — but at what point can she admit that Laura Dean’s constant on again, off again emotional manipulation isn’t fine? Frederica tries and fails to balance her relationship with her friendships, sacrificing her relationship with her best friend, Doodle, in lieu of sticking it out with Laura Dean. Few works have so perfectly captured the nuance of what it means to be a romantically troubled queer teen, and Laura Dean does it with grace and empathy to spare. With gorgeous page spreads, a muted color palette, and character design just as compelling as the narrative, Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up With Me is one of the best comics of the year. — Palmer Haasch

Get it here: Amazon | First Second Books | Your Local Comic Shop

Donny Cates, Dylan Burnett/Marvel Comics

Cosmic Ghost Rider: Baby Thanos Must Die

Writing: Donny Cates, Art: Dylan Burnett

One of the unique subgenres of superhero comics is the Cosmic, a setting birthed in pre-space age days of the Flash Gordon serial; nurtured under the arcano-astral visuals of Kirby, Ditko, and Mobius; and matured under the influence of Lucas, Herbert, and Clarke. It’s a place where gods and spaceships are equally common and the vast emptiness of space is veritably teeming with interstellar empires and final frontiers.

Cosmic stories can be a challenging hook for new readers, precisely because they have so few parallels outside of superhero comics settings. But then … there’s Cosmic Ghost Rider: Baby Thanos Must Die.

It’s a comic about what happens when an alternate universe version of the Punisher — who has gained the powers of both the Ghost Rider and Galactus’ herald, the Silver Surfer — decides to go back in time and kill Thanos in his cradle. Basically nothing goes the way you think it would go from there.

The most surprising thing about Cosmic Ghost Rider: Baby Thanos Must Die is that as bizarre as Donny Cates’ plot is, and as inventive as Dylan Burnett’s art is, the book is totally accessible, and totally convincing of the madcap fun that can be found in the cosmic genre.

Get it here: Amazon | Comixology | Marvel Comics | Your Local Comic Shop

Simon Spurrier, Matías Bergara/Boom! Studios

Coda

Writing: Simon Spurrier, Art: Matías Bergara

What if The Last Unicorn was metal? What if Schmendrick the Magician was a bard, but way more more self-centered, and also rode an enormous, hairy, foul-tempered, obsidian, five-horned unicorn?

Hum, the hero of Coda, is on a Mad Max-esque wander through the fantasy post-apocalypse because he wants to rescue his wife, who he says was kidnapped by orcs. But the tale is neither your standard fantasy yarn nor even your run-of-the-mill cynical subversion of the standard fantasy yarn.

Following its musical namesake, the book is about when something comes to an end and then keeps going, a post-apocalyptic epic about what it takes to truly break the bad habits of society and properly move on. Si Spurrier’s Hum is our falstaffian protagonist, taking advantage of his world’s hunger for a hero to believe in, as he searches for his own equally deluded happy ending. Bergara’s art fills the book with broken cities and crumbling dragon skeletons, trading caravans run by a mermaid crone in a bathtub and mobile bandit cities drawn by ponderous giants, all rendered with the kind of eye for light and color and composition that will drop your jaw.

Coda deserves a quiet read where you contemplate what it really takes to set aside the old harmful ways and forge new and unknown ones — and it also deserves to be splashed across the side of an old van in neon colors.

Get it here: Amazon | Comixology | Boom! Studios | Your Local Comic Shop

Stephanie Hans/Image Comics

Die

Writing: Kieron Gillen, Art: Stephanie Hans

Die begins with five estranged forty-something friends, called together after they all receive a strange note. Twenty-five years ago they were six friends about to start a new tabletop campaign, when they were somehow transported inside the world of the game itself. It took two years, and a magical oath to never talk about what happened to them, but five of them managed to escape.

Now, with every wound of their past still simmering, the remaining adults are dragged back into a world built from their greatest teenage triumphs and failures, overseen by their vengeful gamemaster — the friend they had to leave behind.

Kieron Gillen just closed his five-year run on The Wicked + The Divine, a book that might be said to be about a young person’s longing to grow up but fear of growing old, and Die looks like the inverse. An adult’s longing for the freedom of youth and fear that it can never be recaptured. But that’s just one side.

Keep turning Die around and you’ll find the fantasy genre — in particular the aspects shaped by gaming — de- and reconstructed with the surgical precision that can only come from someone who loves gaming and fantasy so much that it has become a part of themselves.

All of that creative energy is paired with Stephanie Hans’ haunting visualizations of concepts like “the fae but they’re an alien AI” or “a cyberpunk rogue but your abilities are fueled by drugs and the drugs disappear every morning like fairy gold,” making every issue a journey of visual discovery as well. Die was one of the gut-punchingest comics I read this year.

Get it here: Amazon | Comixology | Image Comics | Your Local Comic Shop

Source: Polygon